The two nations are divided, according to Amanda Foreman's history of the American civil war and its repercussions in Britain, not by a common language but by mutual animosity. Don't trust the cant of politicians about a special relationship. "I HATE England," novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, at the time his country's consul in Liverpool, fumed in capitals, while the secretary of the US Treasury ranted that he would like to grab "Old Mother England by the hair" and give her a shake.
Offered a choice between the industrial Union and the slave-owning Confederacy, an MP such as John Roebuck had no hesitation about who to back. The plantation owners of the south counted as honorary Englishmen; the immigrant hordes of the north were "the scum and refuse of Europe".
Foreman says she was shocked, when she began researching her subject, to discover that Roebuck and his liberal colleagues – along with countless British "journalists, writers, university students, actors, social reformers and clergy", all of them bleeding-heart elitists who surely read or contributed to the Observer – sympathised with the feudal south. A further shock ensued: the war, she found, was not really a campaign to abolish slavery. Abraham Lincoln declared that his purpose was to maintain the Union, which he intended to do "by freeing all the slaves" or "without freeing any slave": politics mattered more than principles.
On this side of the Atlantic, decisions were made for venally self-interested reasons. The United States now lumbers into battle to protect its supply of oil; for Lancashire mill owners and their parliamentary stooges, the civil war was about cotton, without which the textile industry would have faltered. A Texan senator smugly bellowed: "Cotton is king" and demanded that Queen Victoria "bend the knee in fealty and acknowledge allegiance to that monarch". She did so, and her deference marked the decline of one economic empire and the beginning of another. The French, if it is any consolation, appeased the south because of an even pettier and nastier craving. A female spy for the Confederacy, who obtained an interview with Napoleon III, reported that "they want tobacco now quite as much as the English want cotton".
Foreman's incendiary title is almost justified: America's fratricidal quarrel nearly kindled into a world war. Washington threatened to attack Britain because ironclad ships for use by the south were being fitted up on the Mersey. Russia, expecting England and France to be at war with the Americans, sent its warships to anchor in New York, where the admiral was ordered "to give every impression of military support short of actually lying". A peripheral dispute between England and Germany over Danish rights in Schleswig-Holstein promised extra advantages for the US: the New York Times gloated that before Germany could go to war with England it would have to buy itself a new navy, "manned, equipped and armed" in American ports.
Near the end of the civil war, another front opened along the Canadian border. Confederate guerrillas sneaked down from Ontario to conduct raids on the Union, and Palmerston, then prime minister, feared that US gunboats would seize the Great Lakes and block the St Lawrence seaway.
An epic, as Foreman's blustery subtitle claims? As the daughter of Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplays for The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone, she is perhaps imagining a Hollywood blockbuster, or at least an HBO miniseries; her previous biography, about a prototype of Princess Diana, was filmed as The Duchess with Keira Knightley. Certainly, Foreman's style is camera-ready, as when she luridly describes New Orleans as "like a poisonous flower, beautiful to behold but dangerous to the touch".
But if it is an epic, it lacks a hero. Even Lincoln – addled, weary, compromised by the politically incorrect connections of his wife, three of whose brothers died while fighting on the Confederate side – disappears into the chaotic crowd around him. Another of the short, sharp shocks administered by Foreman concerns his address at Gettysburg, inflated after the event into a divine pronouncement about the nation's moral authority: it consisted, she points out, of 272 words, and took less than two minutes to deliver.
In the absence of heroes, Foreman marshals a cast of thousands. Hers is narrative history aspiring to the condition of the Victorian novel. Trollope, Dickens, Louisa M Alcott and Hawthorne are incidental characters, along with Leslie Stephen, who visited the war zone before he began editing the Dictionary of National Biography.
Foreman refuses to depersonalise history as the play of "movements, forces, factors"; she knows that global convulsions are the sum total of innumerable individual actions and she does a fine job of individualising those anonymous, transitory actors – Lincoln with his gargantuan feet and his wife with her over-energetic fan; a Union general called Burnside whose whiskers created the fashion for sideburns; a teenage runaway who fled to America from Lancashire after fathering a bastard but found he had to pretend to be a Scot "to avoid the anti-English prejudice" of his colleagues in the Union army.
Once in a while, the anecdotes do read like mawkish out-takes from a Spielberg movie. At the battle of Shiloh, a boy picks a posy of violets and offers the flowers to General Sherman as "a sign of peace". Sherman sticks them in his cap; the boy, of course, is almost immediately shot down.
Foreman is excellent on tactics, less good on strategy. She stays at ground level, close to the combatants, which means that the war – best understood from a detached vertical distance – remains a muddle. I ended her long book unsure of why it was fought; I also ended it wondering whether the tangled mess of individual stories, like the simultaneous plots of a Victorian novel, had reached any definite conclusion. I then remembered a visit a while ago to Richmond, Virginia, where, near the state capitol, I came upon a battalion of troops in Confederate uniforms camped out for a battle re-enactment that, complete with blood-curdling rebel yells, was due to take an entire weekend. The civil war did not end in 1865. It rages on, fought not along the Mason-Dixon Line but between red and blue states, or between the patriotic heartland and the effete, expendable east and west coasts.
"Two Nations Divided"? No, this is above all the story of one nation that, despite the pledge of allegiance Americans daily repeat, has not proved to be "indivisible".
